29 June 2015

MEANWHILE IN THE REST OF THE WORLD......

While people in the US have been preoccupied with domestic concerns there are ominous clouds gathering in the rest of the world. There is the fiscal crisis in Greece which will be addressed separately, three terrorist attacks in different places on the same day, ongoing slaughter by ISIS that has now apparently become too routine to report on it, mischief making by Vladimir Putin, and worst of all, the turn things have taken with the Iranian nuclear talks. Normally there might be good reasons for the US to take some action on all these fronts, but with the possible exception of Greece, at this point in time we are better off doing nothing than acting due to the fecklessness and incompetence of this administration.

It increasingly appears as though they are caving in to the Iranian ayatollahs in the nuclear talks. It is just unbelievable that a French Socialist government is taking a harder, more realistic line with regard to Iranian nukes than the US because they are concerned that this administration is going to give away the store. What does it tell us, when the Europeans, for the first time in memory, are taking a harder line than the US? Meanwhile Israel is in the doghouse due to contempt for Netanyahu, who increasingly is being proven to have been right all along. No deal is better than this deal. All other missteps are containable and remediable, but not when it comes to increasing the chance of blowing up the world.

Also ominous is the the massacre of 38 European tourists in a Tunisian resort, because of the terrible impact one evil actor can have on a country’s economy. Tourists are leaving, canceling trips as a result of this seriously damaging the country’s economy, and harming all those poor people who work in that field. The Tunisians I have interacted with have all been good and gracious individuals, identify with the modern world, and simply want the opportunity freely live in it like everyone else. They don’t deserve this.

With regard to terrorism, we should remain vigilant, but hold off any significant action until this administration leaves office. It makes a lot more sense to hold your fire than to mobilize action under an incompetent command. This is clearly no longer our problem, but the entire world’s. From Europe to Russia to Arabia to India to China to Africa and beyond, we are all in the same position, and fortunately on the same side, something we unfortunately have failed to make any use of to any significant degree, but if properly approached would go a long way towards putting an end to this. This is something the President could and should have pulled off, given the expectations and good will he had coming into office, but instead of utilizing that credit to pull everyone together on this, he went around the world disparaging his own country, apologizing to Muslims who did not ask for it, criticizing Christians, sowing more division and chaos, and achieving even lower US standing the world than his demonized predecessor. He has also improbably managed to enable Vladimir Putin to represent himself as a more plausible beacon of western tradition.

Americans, at least those who are politically concerned, waste an undue amount of time and energy contesting domestic issues that the President actually does not have much power over. It is in foreign affairs that the President wields more power and can determine the direction of things, sometimes for better, be just as often for worse. Policy is no doubt important, but not as much as competence, which has been in pretty short supply, not just in this one but over the past few administrations.